It’s a gas, gas, gas
There’s lots of good, scientific, politically correct reasons to want to use less gas. Here’s one that everyone can agree on: It’s expensive. And it’s not likely to get significantly cheaper any time soon. What follows are a couple interesting twists on some ideas that have been in the public eye recently.
Hybrid Cars: I carpooled with a friend who had a Prius and there is no way to get around the fact close to 50 miles per gallon is better than the 17 or 18 miles pert gallon I get. Of course, you have to buy one of these cars first, and last time I checked, there’s a waiting list, which means a) you have to wait, and b) you have no chance to negotiate on price for the car. Both of those things will change, of course, as supply catches up with demand. Here is another thing I am hoping will change with hybrid cars: Adding a plug. The link goes to the website of the California Cars Initiative, and their idea is this: A hybrid car runs on electric power, and runs a gas engine to recharge the batteries. If you run the car just on the batteries, you have a range of about 100 miles. Ninety-five percent of the time, most people don’t drive more than 100 miles in a day, so you could conceivably run a hybrid car on batteries alone and plug it in at night (when power generation is cheaper anyway in most places) and never use the gas engine at all. The reason you keep the gas engine and the hybrid function is for the times when you need to go more than 100 miles between charging. Relying on electic power primarily gives you an equivalent cost of about $1 a gallon, and actual MPG would depend on how much you drive. I find it odd that the hybrid car wasn’t originally released with this feature. From what I understand, the car makers marketing departments seemed to think that hybrids wouldn’t sell if they had a plug. The reasoned that the more they seemed like “regular” cars, the better.
Biodiesel: This miracle diesel fuel from waste vegetable oil sounds great. No pumping it from the ground, no geopolitics, no oil spills. But where to buy it for your diesel car or truck? There’s no place around my house that sells it, so clearly the trick–and biodiesel’s clear advantage over petrochemicals–is you can make your own. One set of directions is here. It doesn’t sound that hard, but whipping up 40 or 50 gallons a week may start to be a drag. Plus the problem is getting hold of the waste vegetable oil in the first place. Sure, a lot of restaurants currently pay someone to haul it away, so if you go talk to the boss, you might get yourself a sweet deal of free raw material. I suspect, though, that the biodiesel process is simple enough and cheap enough that local processors will catch on and take what is currently a homebrew biodiesel movement and turn it into business. Which will probably be a good thing.
But maybe you’re not ready to shell out money for a new car, and you don’t have a diesel engine car and/or the space in your apartment to cook up a 55-gallon drum of biodiesel every other week or so. Let’s keep things simple… what about bicycling? Well, to be honest, I would love to bike to work, and when I lived close enough, I did every now and then. The problem then and to an even greater extent now that my office is 30 miles from home is showing up at work all sweaty. Unless you live a couple miles or so from the office, it’s a tough issue to overcome. But here is one way to do it: A motor. This particular motor will get you about 60 miles or so on a tank and you’ll get about 250 miles per gallon. And you can cruise up the hills and disengage the motor for downhills. This particular motor runs about $600, and I ran the numbers on my morning commute and I figure it would pay for itself in just a few months.
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[…] Original post by Mr. Alex […]
It’s a gas, gas, gas…
There’s lots of good, scientific, politically correct reasons to want to use less gas. Here’s one that everyone can agree on: It’s expensive. And it’s not likely to get significantly cheaper any time soon. What follows are a couple interesting …
In England we pay around £0.95 /liter (that’s about $1.86/liter or $7.04 per US gallon!) for both Petrol and Diesel. That’s why I traded in my BMW M3 convertible for a 530Diesel load lugger and am now setting up to make home brew Bio Diesel. The whole save the planet bits good too…
Marc
Hear, hear!
BTW, I was totally waiting for the Rolling Stones comment somewhere in there.
Hybrid Cars In Demand…
Good news to all eco-friendly car enthusiasts. There is an increase of 28% from last yearÂ’s 254,545 and this number pertains to those new registered hybrids. ItÂ’s good news for environmentalists and hybrid makers knowing that the demand did quite slo…
I find it odd that the hybrid car wasn’t originally released [to run on batteries alone]. From what I understand, the [car-makers’] marketing departments seemed to think that hybrids wouldn’t sell if they had a plug. [They] reasoned that the more they seemed like “regular†cars, the better.
DMA (Dear Mr. Alex),
Do you GUWRAYDK (get unhappy when reading acronyms* you don’t know)? ID (I do). BNS.
Anywho, HYS (have you seen) “Who Killed the Electric Car?â€
http://www.sonyclassics.com/whokilledtheelectriccar/
http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/223/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F
It’s a bit polemical, so it’s hard to know what really — “objectively†speaking — happened. However, it does seem as though the only reason American car manufacturers attempted producing electric cars was to meet California’s ZEV (Zero Emission Vehicle) Mandate, which required two percent of the state’s vehicles to have no emissions by 1998 and 10 percent by 2003. And it also seems clear that they stopped once the ZEV Mandate was eliminated, which was probably the net result of lobbying by American car manufacturers.
I don’t really know why the Prius wasn’t originally released to run on batteries alone, but what follows is my uneducated musings, SIS (stuff I stole), or my WR (web report):
Toyota didn’t start with an electric car in mind; instead, they tried to put a CYA (cover your ass) plan into effect for a company that already made cars with ICEs (internal combustion engine). Also, they initially had a lot of problems with the batteries, so that wasn’t something they wanted to stress.
“The car that became the Prius began life in 1993, when Eiji Toyoda, Toyota’s chairman and the patriarch of its ruling family, expressed concern about the future of the automobile. Yoshiro Kimbara, then executive vice president in charge of R&D, … embarked on a project known as G21 (for global 21st century) to develop a new small car that could be sold worldwide. He set two goals: to develop new production methods and to wring better fuel economy from the traditional internal combustion engine. His target was 47.5 miles per gallon, a little more than 50% better than what the Corolla, Toyota’s popular small car, was getting at the time.â€
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/03/06/8370702/index.htm
(This site also talks more about the technological and marketing problems they faced.)
“Watching developments from across the Pacific were the product planners at the company’s U.S. division, Toyota Motor Sales, in Torrance, Calif. The TMS planners had first heard about hybrids at a meeting in Japan in 1995. ‘It was all new and unconventional,’ recalls marketing executive Mark Amstock. ‘There was skepticism within the company about whether the hybrids were really cars.’ Early consumer research in the U.S. supported the skeptics. ‘It wasn’t clear that better fuel economy alone could drive premium pricing,” says Andrew Coetzee, now vice president of product planning for TMS. [‘It’s difficult to build consumer technology awareness,’ says Chris Hostetter, now vice president of advanced-product strategy. ‘Consumers would have to be taught that the car didn’t come with an extension cord. Dealers would have to be trained on how to sell the car and service it.’] But another factor was at play at TMS: the ever more stringent emission targets set by the California Air Resources Board [i.e. the ZEV Mandate]. Gradually support began to build around hybrid’s ecological potential.†http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/03/06/8370702/index.htm
When the cars came out, they proved to be quite successful in both Japan (starting in 1997) and the U.S. (starting in 2000). One of the reasons that it was successful was marketing’s favorite new color: green — as in ecologically friendly (not $), as in a bastardized marketing version which doesn’t really care about being green (ecologically friendly) but green ($). And, ironically (or not), this success probably made it less likely that Toyota will make a Prius that runs on batteries alone:
“ ‘We just went to Toyota and we asked them about all this grassroots demand for plug-in hybrids and the Prius seems like the obvious first car to start with and people are making them in their garages. Why don’t you build a plug-in Prius?’ and they said, ‘Because we don’t have to. So many people are buying the gas-burning version we don’t need to build anything else.’ â€
http://www.autobloggreen.com/2006/06/22/exclusive-qanda-with-chelsea-sexton-about-the-ev1-why-the-priu/
Thank you for reading my WR.
SY (Sincerely yours),
MM (Mr. Monkey)
*I don’t hate all acronyms. I just hate it when pages are filled with acronyms — for example bureaucratese, serious and “serious†disciplines (e.g., medical stuff on the one hand and literary theory on the other), IMing, and blogs. (I teach ESL ((English as a Second Language)), and it’s filled with acronyms, too.) I think that acronyms should simplify life by making it easier to communicate (which, in fact, they do for people who understand them), but I’ve become a crotchety old man who doesn’t understand what youngins are saying, and I don’t like it!
Oh, I DO like words that are actually acronyms that many people don’t know are acronyms — like radar, scuba, and laser. Do any of you know any more?
DMA,
Here’s Ira Flatow’s discussion with the Chris Paine (the director of “Who Killed the Electric Car?â€), Bill Moore (the publisher of EVWorld.com), and callers talking about *EVs, *HVs, converting cars with *ICEs into *EVs, and converting *HVs into *PHEVs or *GO-HEVs.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5524918
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_hybrid_electric_vehicle
SY,
MM
P.S. BTW, TMS initially considered an SUV HV, but they thought it wasn’t PC.
Dear Mr. Alex,
I’m sorry to bogart the blog, but I clicked on one of the “Ads by Goooooogle†(Sometimes those have some interesting stuff.), and I found a nice bit of synchronicity. If you click on the Edmunds link to the right (“Car Gas Mileageâ€), you’ll see this headline: “Will GM Win the Great Plug-In Hybrid Race?†Then, if you click on that, it talks about GM’s EV1 and “Who Killed the Electric Car?†(which focuses on the EV1).
Sincerely,
Mr. Monkey
buy paxil without prescription…
news…
I know this comment is a little out of date, but I was perusing your past blog history and ran across this article.
There are companies who will convert your hybrid vehicle to allow recharging of the battery by the grid. On company in Boulder, CO called Hybrids Plus say that they replace the NiMH battery pack with a lithium ion pack to allow more storage capacity and install a custom made charging unit. They do this on a Prius for ~$20,000. recently they said that the price will drop significantly due to improvements in manufacturing.
Jason:
Thanks for the comment.
Actually, I just read that on the basis of work by a group called Calcar that has developed technologies for making a Prius a plug-in hybrid, Toyota is actually thinking about making them that way at the factory.
THAT would be cool.
[…] I should be ready to begin seriously using this thing before the start of next week. Permalink | Trackback | del.icio.us DiggReddit […]
[…] Last summer, as gas prices climbed up past $3.50 a gallon here in California, I was increasingly frustrated with my 70-mile-a-day commute, made worse by the fact that LA traffic not only was costing me more than $10 a day in gas, but at least 3 hours a day behind the wheel of my car. My solution: A motorized bicycle. […]